How to DRAMATICALLY improve the captures of your PV-231

[glinckens]

I own a PV-231 mpeg-1 capture card for a year now, and I have always been a bit unsatisfied by the quality of scenes that have the camera "panning" (when capturing in VideoCD mode). This causes the image to have blocks in it.
Especially PAL captures have this problem, strange enough this doesn't occur as much with NTSC captures.
As all you PV-231/233 owners will know, Skittelsen's registry settings are about as optimized as they can be. Unfortunately I still got blocks in panning scenes.
Skittelsen's registry settings apply to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MPEG-I\WMPEG200\CaptureConfig, which controls the capture configuration part of the Win200f capture application.

To further increase the capture quality you can also edit the behaviour of the ZKMPJ.SYS driver. This can be done in the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Cl ass\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0005\Parameters
If you can't find the above key in your registry, try searching on "VinFieldOffset" and you'll find it.
Now change the Dword_value "A_VVerticalSyncLocked" from "1" to "0" and reboot your computer.

This dramatically improves the quality of moving scenes in your captures because the Mpeg-encoder chip won't try to synch each captured frame with the source's vertical sync signal, resulting in a smoother and cleaner capture without any blocks. The resulting mpeg is still fully VCD compliant.

I hope this has helped some of you PV-231/233 owners...

Regards, Guido Linckens.

[GOPper]

Hey, nice tip! This really improves the quality of the caps with this card! I didn't think the quality could be any better, but this really improves it. But do you also know what those other entries in the registry do?

[glinckens]

They don't do anything about the quality of your captures. I've tried to modify them and see what happened, but changing them only makes the capture application refuse to recognise the card.